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Iron Curtains and Satin Sheets: "Strange Loves" in Cold War Popular Music Russell Reising Cover of Jefferson Airplane's "Crown of Creation" Many Americans know of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, a tiny, grandmotherly woman with a heavy Germanic accent who, throughout the 1980s, dispensed love and sex advice to American television and radio audiences, often in shockingly, or at least titillatingly, graphic physical detail and frank language. A different doctor, one who also spoke in Germanically accented English, however, was in residence as the popular culture love and sex guru during the height of the Cold War. Stanley Kubrick's fictional Dr. Strangelove, the ex-Nazi defense theorist who stifled "Heil Hitler" salutes as he planned post-World War III orgies, lingers as a haunting reminder of the toll wreaked on human love and intimacy by the emotional terrors of the Cold War and its threat of instant nuclear obliteration. Even the resourceful Dr. Ruth would have a hard time offering advice to the Chiffons asking "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow," when nuclear attack rendered the inevitability of "tomorrow" problematic, or to Tommy James and the Shondells's lovers who pant to each other "I Think We're Alone Now," if a nuclear war Copyright © 2003 by Russell Reising and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 Reising 2 left them genuinely alone, the only two surviving human beings on earth. In some respects, rock and roll is the ultimate Cold War art form, the vehicle for the cathartic wails of a generation which was told to conform and aspire to a middle-class existence, but which knew all the while that the entire world could be incinerated in thirty minutes.
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